Scala Language Creator Launches Startup Typesafe

title=A Simpler Programming Model}

Meanwhile, Akka is an event-driven middleware framework for building high performance and reliable distributed applications. Akka decouples business logic from low-level mechanisms such as threads, locks and non-blocking I/O. Akka version 1.1, available for the first time today, builds on the recent 1.0 release by offering improved packaging, performance, and scalability. In a February blog post on the Scala project Website, Phil Bagwell, an engineer on the Typesafe team, wrote of the release of Akka 1.0:

"Akka is an open-source Scala project that gives developers a simpler programming model to develop highly reliable applications for concurrent or parallel operation. Using the popular Actor model as a basis, Akka extends the concept to provide high availability and fault tolerance. Akka contains high performance components that allow you to simply carry out safe concurrent operations in an application. Software Transactional Memory (STM), for example, has been combined with Actors to provide Transactional Actors giving you an elegantly way to specify such things as message flow, automatic retry and rollback. Akka has many advanced features that enable reliable concurrent systems to be developed faster."

The Scala IDE for Eclipse provides a rich development environment with syntax highlighting, code completion, and integrated debugging, company officials said. Scala IDE version 2.0, in beta today, was recently rebuilt from the ground-up by Typesafe for improved performance and stability.  Complementing the IDE, Simple Build Tool (sbt) automates compilation and dependency management of Scala and Java projects.

Alex Payne, former platform lead at Twitter and current CTO of online banking startup BankSimple, said: "Scala played a critical role in improving the scalability and reliability of Twitter's backend services. At BankSimple, our team is using both Scala and Akka to build a flexible architecture that allows us to rapidly integrate with our partners and scale predictably when needed. We're happy to know that the brilliant people at Typesafe are supporting Scala and Akka with a comprehensive set of commercial services."

"Looks like some great minds are behind this company," Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC, told eWEEK. "It makes sense that as programming ideas evolve, new languages with primitives supporting them are born. We already saw new Java EE proposals to support multi-tenancy and elasticity. So the question is will we need new languages for these or is it enough to incorporate in the frameworks."

The Typesafe Stack is backed by Typesafe co-founders Odersky, Boner and their team of engineers. Typesafe not only offers optional commercial support and maintenance through the Typesafe Subscription, but also provides documentation, training and consulting services to help extend the use and productivity of Scala in the Java ecosystem.

"We're entering a polyglot era in software development, driven by cloud and multicore systems architectures, as new languages emerge to challenge, and coexist with, the long hegemony of Java and .NET," said James Governor, analyst at RedMonk, in a statement. "Typesafe is a commercial business aiming to catalyze momentum around Scala, one of the languages building real grassroots interest and adoption at sites such as Twitter and The Guardian."

Typesafe will be participating in Scala Days 2011, the premier annual event for Scala enthusiasts, researchers and practitioners, at Stanford University on June 2-3, 2011. Typesafe will also be offering Scala and Akka training courses on May 31 and June 1 at Stanford, preceding the Scala Days conference.